Publications (10)30.03 Total impact
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Article: Minor structural abnormalities in the infant face disrupt neural processing: A unique window into early caregiving responses.
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ABSTRACT: Infant faces elicit early, specific activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a key cortical region for reward and affective processing. A test of the causal relationship between infant facial configuration and OFC activity is provided by naturally occurring disruptions to the face structure. One such disruption is cleft lip, a small change to one facial feature, shown to disrupt parenting. Using magnetoencephalography, we investigated neural responses to infant faces with cleft lip compared with typical infant and adult faces. We found activity in the right OFC at 140 ms in response to typical infant faces but diminished activity to infant faces with cleft lip or adult faces. Activity in the right fusiform face area was of similar magnitude for typical adult and infant faces but was significantly lower for infant faces with cleft lip. This is the first evidence that a minor change to the infant face can disrupt neural activity potentially implicated in caregiving.Social neuroscience 05/2013; · 3.17 Impact Factor -
Article: Minor structural abnormalities in the infant face disrupt neural processing: A unique window into early caregiving responses
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Infant faces elicit early, specific activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a key cortical region for reward and affective processing. A test of the causal relationship between infant facial configuration and OFC activity is provided by naturally occurring disruptions to the face structure. One such disruption is cleft lip, a small change to one facial feature, shown to disrupt parenting. Using magnetoencephalography, we investigated neural responses to infant faces with cleft lip compared with typical infant and adult faces.We found activity in the right OFC at 140 ms in response to typical infant faces but diminished activity to infant faces with cleft lip or adult faces. Activity in the right fusiform face area was of similar magnitude for typical adult and infant faces but was significantly lower for infant faces with cleft lip. This is the first evidence that a minor change to the infant face can disrupt neural activity potentially implicated in caregiving.Social Neuroscience. 01/2013; -
Article: Interpreting Infant Vocal Distress: The Ameliorative Effect of Musical Training in Depression.
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ABSTRACT: An infant's cry is one of the most emotionally salient sounds in our environment. Depression is known to disrupt a mother's ability to respond to her infant, but it is not well-understood why such difficulties arise. One reason might be that depression disrupts the perceptual abilities necessary to interpret infant's affective cues. Given that musicians are known to have enhanced auditory perception, we assessed whether depression and previous musical training can impact on the ability to interpret distress in infant cries, as manipulated by changes in pitch. Depressed participants with musical training demonstrated better discriminative acuity of distress in infant cry bursts compared to those without. Non-depressed participants, with and without musical training, had levels comparable to musicians with depression. We suggest that previous musical training may act as a protective factor that maintains auditory perceptual abilities in the context of depression. These findings have potential implications for the development of novel training interventions to maintain sensitivity to infant vocal cues in individuals with postnatal depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).Emotion 07/2012; · 3.88 Impact Factor -
Article: MEG can map short and long-term changes in brain activity following deep brain stimulation for chronic pain.
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ABSTRACT: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been shown to be clinically effective for some forms of treatment-resistant chronic pain, but the precise mechanisms of action are not well understood. Here, we present an analysis of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from a patient with whole-body chronic pain, in order to investigate changes in neural activity induced by DBS for pain relief over both short- and long-term. This patient is one of the few cases treated using DBS of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We demonstrate that a novel method, null-beamforming, can be used to localise accurately brain activity despite the artefacts caused by the presence of DBS electrodes and stimulus pulses. The accuracy of our source localisation was verified by correlating the predicted DBS electrode positions with their actual positions. Using this beamforming method, we examined changes in whole-brain activity comparing pain relief achieved with deep brain stimulation (DBS ON) and compared with pain experienced with no stimulation (DBS OFF). We found significant changes in activity in pain-related regions including the pre-supplementary motor area, brainstem (periaqueductal gray) and dissociable parts of caudal and rostral ACC. In particular, when the patient reported experiencing pain, there was increased activity in different regions of ACC compared to when he experienced pain relief. We were also able to demonstrate long-term functional brain changes as a result of continuous DBS over one year, leading to specific changes in the activity in dissociable regions of caudal and rostral ACC. These results broaden our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of DBS in the human brain.PLoS ONE 01/2012; 7(6):e37993. · 4.09 Impact Factor -
Article: Listening to infant distress vocalizations enhances effortful motor performance.
Acta Paediatrica 12/2011; 101(4):e189-91. · 2.07 Impact Factor -
Article: Postnatal depression and its effects on child development: a review of evidence from low- and middle-income countries.
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ABSTRACT: It is well established that postnatal depression (PND) is prevalent in high-income countries and is associated with negative personal, family and child developmental outcomes. Here, studies on the prevalence of maternal PND in low- and middle-income countries are reviewed and a geographical prevalence map is presented. The impact of PND upon child outcomes is also reviewed. The available evidence suggests that rates of PND are substantial, and in many regions, are higher than those reported for high-income countries. An association between PND and adverse child developmental outcomes was identified in many of the countries examined. Significant heterogeneity in prevalence rates and impact on child outcomes across studies means that the true extent of the disease burden is still unclear. Nonetheless, there is a compelling case for the implementation of interventions to reduce the impact of PND on the quality of the mother-infant relationship and improve child outcomes.British Medical Bulletin 12/2011; 101:57-79. · 4.54 Impact Factor -
Article: The motivational salience of infant faces is similar for men and women.
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ABSTRACT: Infant facial features are thought to be powerful elicitors of caregiving behaviour. It has been widely assumed that men and women respond in different ways to those features, such as a large forehead and eyes and round protruding cheeks, colloquially described as 'cute'. We investigated experimentally potential differences using measures of both conscious appraisal ('liking') and behavioural responsivity ('wanting') to real world infant and adult faces in 71 non-parents. Overall, women gave significantly higher 'liking' ratings for infant faces (but not adult faces) compared to men. However, this difference was not seen in the 'wanting' task, where we measured the willingness of men and women to key-press to increase or decrease viewing duration of an infant face. Further analysis of sensitivity to cuteness, categorising infants by degree of infantile features, revealed that both men and women showed a graded significant increase in both positive attractiveness ratings and viewing times to the 'cutest' infants. We suggest that infant faces may have similar motivational salience to men and women, despite gender idiosyncrasies in their conscious appraisal.PLoS ONE 01/2011; 6(5):e20632. · 4.09 Impact Factor -
Article: The effect of cleft lip on adults' responses to faces: cross-species findings.
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ABSTRACT: Cleft lip and palate is the most common of the congenital conditions affecting the face and cranial bones and is associated with a raised risk of difficulties in infant-caregiver interaction; the reasons for such difficulties are not fully understood. Here, we report two experiments designed to explore how adults respond to infant faces with and without cleft lip, using behavioural measures of attractiveness appraisal ('liking') and willingness to work to view or remove the images ('wanting'). We found that infants with cleft lip were rated as less attractive and were viewed for shorter durations than healthy infants, an effect that was particularly apparent where the cleft lip was severe. Women rated the infant faces as more attractive than men did, but there were no differences in men and women's viewing times of these faces. In a second experiment, we found that the presence of a cleft lip in domestic animals affected adults' 'liking' and 'wanting' responses in a comparable way to that seen for human infants. Adults' responses were also remarkably similar for images of infants and animals with cleft lip, although no gender difference in attractiveness ratings or viewing times emerged for animals. We suggest that the presence of a cleft lip can substantially change the way in which adults respond to human and animal faces. Furthermore, women may respond in different ways to men when asked to appraise infant attractiveness, despite the fact that men and women 'want' to view images of infants for similar durations.PLoS ONE 01/2011; 6(10):e25897. · 4.09 Impact Factor -
Article: Impact of emotion on consciousness: positive stimuli enhance conscious reportability.
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ABSTRACT: Emotion and reward have been proposed to be closely linked to conscious experience, but empirical data are lacking. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a central role in the hedonic dimension of conscious experience; thus potentially a key region in interactions between emotion and consciousness. Here we tested the impact of emotion on conscious experience, and directly investigated the role of the ACC. We used a masked paradigm that measures conscious reportability in terms of subjective confidence and objective accuracy in identifying the briefly presented stimulus in a forced-choice test. By manipulating the emotional valence (positive, neutral, negative) and the presentation time (16 ms, 32 ms, 80 ms) we measured the impact of these variables on conscious and subliminal (i.e. below threshold) processing. First, we tested normal participants using face and word stimuli. Results showed that participants were more confident and accurate when consciously seeing happy versus sad/neutral faces and words. When stimuli were presented subliminally, we found no effect of emotion. To investigate the neural basis of this impact of emotion, we recorded local field potentials (LFPs) directly in the ACC in a chronic pain patient. Behavioural findings were replicated: the patient was more confident and accurate when (consciously) seeing happy versus sad faces, while no effect was seen in subliminal trials. Mirroring behavioural findings, we found significant differences in the LFPs after around 500 ms (lasting 30 ms) in conscious trials between happy and sad faces, while no effect was found in subliminal trials. We thus demonstrate a striking impact of emotion on conscious experience, with positive emotional stimuli enhancing conscious reportability. In line with previous studies, the data indicate a key role of the ACC, but goes beyond earlier work by providing the first direct evidence of interaction between emotion and conscious experience in the human ACC.PLoS ONE 01/2011; 6(4):e18686. · 4.09 Impact Factor -
Article: Application of a null-beamformer to source localisation in MEG data of deep brain stimulation.
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ABSTRACT: In this paper, we present an analysis of magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals from a patient with whole-body chronic pain in order to investigate changes in neural activity induced by DBS. The patient is one of the few cases treated using DBS of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Using MEG to reconstruct the neural activity of interest is challenging because of interference to the signal from the DBS device. We demonstrate that a null-beamformer can be used to localise neural activity despite artefacts caused by the presence of DBS electrodes and stimulus pulses. We subsequently verified the accuracy of our source localisation by correlating the predicted DBS electrode positions with their actual positions, previously identified using anatomical imaging. We also demonstrated increased activity in pain-related regions including the pre-supplementary motor area, brainstem periaqueductal gray and medial prefrontal areas when the patient was in pain compared to when the patient experienced pain relief.Conference proceedings: ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference 01/2010; 2010:4120-3.
Top co-authors
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Institutions
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2011–2012
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University of Oxford
- Department of Psychiatry
Oxford, ENG, United Kingdom -
University of the Witwatersrand
- School of Public Health
Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
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